Today, we’re releasing our

Once we have received a valid legal request for Snapchat account records, we respond in compliance with applicable laws and privacy requirements.

Over the past year, we have been investing in growing this team and continuing to improve their capabilities for timely responding to valid law enforcement requests. The team has expanded by 74%, with many new team members joining across all levels, including some from careers as prosecutors and law enforcement officials with experience in youth safety. As a result of these investments, we have been able to significantly improve our response times for law enforcement investigations by 85% year-over-year. In the case of emergency disclosure requests — some of the most critical requests, which involve the imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury — our 24/7 team usually responds within 30 minutes. To learn more about the types of law enforcement requests Snap receives and the volume of requests, we publish a Transparency Report every six months to provide the public with these important insights. You can read our latest report, covering the first half of 2021, here.

He will also build relationships and seek regular feedback from law enforcement agencies as we continue to identify areas for improvement

Recognizing that Snapchat is built differently than traditional social media platforms, and many members of law enforcement iliar with how our products work and what capabilities we have for supporting their work, one of our top priorities is to provide more — and ongoing — educational resources to help this community better learn how our services and processes work. We recently took two important steps forward as part of this larger focus.

First, we welcomed Rahul Gupta to serve as our first Head of Law Enforcement Outreach. Rahul joined Snap after a distinguished career as a local prosecutor in California, with an expertise in cybercrime, social media, and digital evidence. In this new role, Rahul will develop a global law enforcement outreach program to raise awareness about Snap’s policies for responding to legal data requests.

Second, in October, we held our first-ever Snap Law Enforcement Summit to help build stronger connections and explain our services to U.S. law enforcement officials. More than 1,700 law enforcement officials from federal, state and local agencies participated.

To help measure how useful our inaugural event was and identify areas for opportunity, we surveyed our attendees before and after the Summit. Prior to the Summit, we found that:

We are deeply grateful for all of those who attended, and in light of their feedback, are pleased to share that we will be making our Snap Law Enforcement Summit an annual event in the U.S. We are also planning to expand our outreach to law enforcement agencies in certain countries outside the U.S.

Our long-term goal is to have a world-class Law Enforcement Operations team — and we know we have to continue to make meaningful improvements to get there. We hope our inaugural Summit was the start of an important dialogue with law enforcement stakeholders about how we can continue to build on the progress we’re seeing — and help keep Snapchatters safe.

transparency report for the first half of 2021, which covers the period of January 1 – June 30 of this year. As with recent reports, this installment shares data about violations of our Community Guidelines globally during the period; the number of content reports we received and enforced against across specific categories of violations; how we responded to requests from law enforcement and governments; our enforcements broken down by country; the Violative View Rate of Snapchat content; and incidences of false information on the platform.